The situation on the Slovak labour market is currently developing in favour of applicants for employment. High economic growth, the expanding of companies and the arrival of foreign investors has significantly increased the demand for the labour force both in the industrial sector (growth by about 30 percent) as well as the services sector (roughly 40 percent growth). According to the Statistical Office, nearly 70,000 jobs originated in Slovakia in 2015 – 22,000 of them in industry (15,000 in production) and more than 20,000 new jobs in services.
The largest jobs portal Profesia.sk published for the first 6 months of 2016 more than 120,000 job offers, and the Central Office of Labour, Social Affairs and Family of the Slovak Republic (hereinafter only the “ÚPSVaR”) published ads for more than 43,000 jobs. Unemployment, which in 2015 average 11.5%, dropped below 10% and is currently moving around 9.5%. Despite this, labour offices over all of Slovakia have recorded more than 270,000 unemployed, and companies have declared shortcomings in the labour force (in 2015 most often for driving professions, the position of operator of high-lifting vehicles, welders or assembly workers). The reason for this paradoxical situation is particularly the structural unemployment as a consequence of unbalanced geographic distribution of industrial parks and potential employers and at the same time the low labour mobility of the population.
A consequence of the unbalanced distribution of job opportunities is also regional unemployment, which in 2015 affected eastern Slovakia (16.6% in the Prešov Region) nearly three-times more than Bratislava (6%). The main reasons for this phenomenon are the combination of low creation of jobs in the central and eastern parts of the country and the mentioned lack of mobility.
Barriers to obtaining human capital are unsatisfactory results in the area of education and the disadvantageous state of the social-economic background of selected social groups. The estimated measure of employment among the Roma population in 2014 was roughly 16%, while unemployment was at 73% and long-term unemployment at 37%. The low employment of the Roma is caused mainly by their low level of education (most Roma have only a basic education), low measure of skills, but also an overall lack of interest in work.
Another of the reasons for the lack of the desired labour force is the high interest of companies in qualified workers with professional practice and excellent language skills; however, nearly 25% of applicants at labour offices are applicants with only a basic education.
University graduates made up 5.8% of the total number of unemployed in 2015. According to analysis of the Institute of Financial Policy at the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic, among people with a university education, graduates of veterinary medicine, medicine, law and information technologies are especially able to find (more than 90%) work at the level of their education. In contrast, graduates in the social work, agricultural and environmental fields and graduates of the physical and natural sciences obtain worse application of their education (less than 60% of such graduates work in positions requiring a university education).
On the basis of evaluation of interest from the side of employers, the most desired graduates, according to the portal Profesia.sk, are those in informatics, engineering and economics. In contrast, there is less interest from employers for graduates in education, theology and sport. Highest in the table were graduates of the University of Economics and the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava and the Technical University in Košice (TUKE). Among the leading faculties in the table are first the Faculty of informatics and information technology of the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, second the Faculty of electronics and informatics at TUKE, and third a similar faculty at the Slovak University of Technology.
In the scope of job opportunities the mentioned services sector offers significant opportunities for application on the labour market, specifically so-called shared services centres. These are local branches of large foreign companies operating in the fields of IT, technical support and finance and accounting (for example, IBM, Dell or AT&T). Roughly two-thirds of shared service centres are in Bratislava, and others are in Košice, as well as Nitra, Žilina, or Banská Bystrica.
The advantage of shared service centres is especially in that they offer jobs to university education and language specialists, who due to poor application in Slovakia often go abroad to work, thus causing a so-called “brain drain”. Advanced language knowledge among future candidates is thus very important – active knowledge of English is an essential condition, and from the side of employers knowledge of other foreign languages, such as German or Polish, is preferred.
According to the Business Services Centre Forum, 26 such centres in Slovakia employ more than 30,000 with an average age of 32 years and a gross wage of 1600 euro monthly. Up to 78 percent of them have a university education, and the majority of employees are men (5%) and 12% are foreigners.
Other branches which at present are creating a great many jobs are, for example, human resources (HR) and recruitment (Bratislava Region), quality management and engineering (Trnava, Trenčín and Žilina Regions), administrative and various professional technical jobs (Nitra Region) and in the Košice and Prešov Regions interest has grown in university graduates applying for jobs in informatics and quality management.
An important factor on the labour market is also remuneration for work, which is expressed as a monthly wage. In 2017 the minimum wage in Slovakia is 435 €. The mentioned sum is the gross minimum wage, which means that tax and insurance is deducted from it, and after such deductions the net minimum wage is about 374 €. For each hour worked in 2017 a minimum hourly wage in the amount of 2.50 € must be paid to an employee. The average hourly wage in Slovakia represented in 2015 7.10 € and the average monthly wage 889 €.
The state and employers evaluate the described problems and opportunities on the labour market individually. Those, in the case of deficiencies in the labour force, turn to foreign workers. There is a demand in particular for workers from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, but also Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. According to statistics from the ÚPSVaR, the most foreigners working in Slovakia are from Romania (6279), the Czech Republic (3300), Poland (3062), Hungary (2957), Serbia (2147) and Ukraine (1575).
A priority of the Slovak government in the area of employment is support of economic growth for another 100,000 jobs, in particular with regard to solving long-term unemployment or unemployment among the young. One method of reviving the labour market is through so-called Active Labour Market Measures, which include projects for the support of employment or maintaining of a job. The role of these activities is primarily to ease and speed up the changeover of unemployed citizens into jobs. In addition, active labour market measures also help with the development of business through the support of creating new jobs and maintaining existing jobs. These activities are realized in the form of various allowances and projects on the national and regional levels.
Among other forms of support for employment are job fairs, special regional recruitments, support of student projects and internships, as well as continual cooperation with schools in the form of dual education.
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